The sound - MuleSlow Services

Audio ETC
I
T'S GETTING to be a game for
those with wits, both musical
and engineering, this tracingdown
of the LP reissue, unidentified
as to origin. There are thousands of
them, and prizes for all in the guessing
game courtesy of the record companies,
who remain singularly mum
and give you no hints at al195 per cent
of the time. Guess and guess again.
Mum for sales. Every record, today,
must look brand new, even if it isn't,
even though it may be an honorable
and tim e I e s sol die, qui t e i m­
perishable. Whatever it is, give it a
new cover and shrink wrap it! And say
not a thing about its past, the when
and the where. Not even the copyright.
Have you noticed it's always of
the current year, at least in this country?
In due time, a hundred years, the
scholars and the painstaking researchers
will have to get busy on this problem.
I can see PhDs granted by the
dozens. If I were such a scholar, I
should already be in 47th heaven-there's
so much to do. But I am
not and never will be. I love a good
mystery and I hate to dispel it too
quickly with dull facts. I don't make
investigative phone calls. I much prefer
to listen, and put my 2 and 2 together.
I do indeed respect the oldies
now being reissued by the hundreds;
many of them I reviewed when they
were genuine newies. The LP is more
than a quarter of a century old and
the 78 electric goes back half a century-I
was there, more or less, all
along. I saw and I heard. I listened all
the way. Often I can, with great luck,
actually put hand to the original
record itself on my own shelves, the
18
Edward Tatnall Canby
source of the reissue, though so often
unnamed. In Europe, most reissue
recordings are dignified with at least
an original copyright date, if not more
precise info as to first label and date of
recording. Not here. Wouldn't sell.
Everything must be new. (Well, if not
new, then legendary.)
So I can't help doing a bit of not-soamateur
sleuthing when a familiar
sound hits my ear-now where have I
heard that before? No phone calls, no
reportage a la TV and newspaper. Just
putting clues together, which gets to
be more fun each year as time gets
ever longer and more crammed with
the records of the past. Take, for instance,
a recent brand-new (?) Ol'ympic
Records release, the Bach Brandenburg
Concertos, 8131 / 2, complete
on only 2 LPs (we cut grooves close
and fine these days), as performed by
the Boyd Neel Orchestra under Boyd
Neel.
For all you know, Mr. B. Neel is one
of those young, longhaired squirts of
a conductor fresh out of something or
other and "acclaimed" already until
acclaim comes out of his ears. But
Boyd Neel happens to be a name I've
known all my life, on records. Facts?
The library? Phone calls to Authority?
Why bother? I already know, because
I heard them, and own them. I know
that in the early 1950s there were
Boyd Neel Orchestra recordings of
Mozart, Bach, and such on the
Oiseau-Lyre lable, which has long
been a subsidiary of London (English
Decca) though originally a French
one-woman outfit, if I remember
rightly. She went back, far back into
78s. My persistent but quirky memory
tells me that somewhere up in my attic
I might find another batch of 78s-1
see them with bright green labels, or
do I?-on which the selfsame Boyd
Neel and his Orchestra played-was it
Mozart? Maybe some of the early
little Symphonies. I am indeed vague,
but very positive none the less.
Recherche du Temps Perdu
Right here my early 78 research
must end. For years I've fought to
keep up with the LP flood and the 78s
have just had to wait. Shelvesful of albums.
Horizontal piles of mixed 78
singles (we always bought singles,
even out of larger works), carefully
stashed so they won't "pour" like
Dali's limp watch, which shellac discs
can easily resemble, given time and
gravity. So you must take my word,
such as it is, on the green-labeled
Boyd Neal 78s. They surely lie within
20 feet of me right now; but as just
surely, it would take me 20 days to dig
them out. Anyhow ... Boyd Neel does
go back. Definitely, I'd say, he is now
a reissue and no musical spring chick.
But this Olympic reissue of Neel has
a modern sound, even so. It is clearly·
from tape (says my ear) and not 78. A
late operation? Now my interest is really
piqued. And I do have an LP card
catalog. Let's look.
Eureka! Under Brandenburg Concertos
(after I had found them in th~
wrong place in the Bach file, under B
instead of C), I note a white card
(mono-stereo is blue) which says
that this very music, by the same orchestra
under Neel himself, can be
found on Unicorn 1041 in my collection,
as of c. 1957. So-out to the
stacks and to. Unicorn. Typical! I still
have some four inches of the LP pro-
AUDIO. FEBRUARY, 1976